Keep The Midnight Out (William Lorimer) by Alex Gray Read Free Book Online

in Sauchiehall Street like Pettigrew & Stephens or Copland & Lye where she’d shopped as a girl. But things were changing in the heart of Glasgow and soon these old Victorian buildings in Buchanan Street would give way to something that his mother-in-law would no doubt consider as brash and modern as the glass-topped edifice of the shopping centre that had been built beside St Enoch’s Square.
    He crossed Argyle Street, skirted the new mall and headed towards Paddy’s Market, smiling to himself: the old way of buying and selling clothes was still rubbing shoulders with the newcomers here in Glasgow. Paddy’s was a frequent haunt of ne’er-do-wells, more for the resetting of stolen goods than anything else, though word had it that drugs were also being channelled through some of the street vendors.
    A small man in a flat cloth cap looked up from behind a table strewn with old clothes, one swift glance that did not meet Lorimer’s blue gaze. As the detective walked on, he could hear the sound of hawking followed by a spit onto the pavement; it was a mark of the man’s bad feelings towards the polis. Even now, in plain clothes, Lorimer was finding it hard to hide his identity from those in the Glasgow underworld; it was as if they could smell a copper the way an animal smelled its enemy.
    Saltmarket was an old part of the city, the river not far away, the tenement buildings towering overhead, closing in on these narrower streets. It was hard to imagine the expanse of Glasgow Green so nearby. He turned a corner and there was the High Court of Justiciary, its Greek portico dominating the other buildings, pale sandstone columns like raised fingers of admonition to those in fear of their lives. In contrast, the city mortuary was a squat, grey place, its back doors facing the grand courts, ready to admit the dead.
     
    He was to meet the procurator fiscal at the mortuary – someone new in his limited experience of CID. There had not been much contact with the Crown Office so far, such liaisons not considered vital during the start of an investigation. A quick glance at his wristwatch told him that he was still on time; Donald Anderson was not someone he would want to keep waiting, Lorimer had been advised.
    The man whose body had been dragged up from the river was the sort of anonymous person that Americans referred to as a John Doe. Here, in the west of Scotland, the authorities had no such terms of reference for these unidentified souls whose corpses were kept in the refrigerated cabinets awaiting the time when a friend or relative might come to claim them.
    The mortuary superintendent gave him a nod as he entered.
    ‘Just over there, son,’ he said with a grin above his closely clipped white moustache. ‘They’ve not begun yet so you’ll be able to see the entire process.’
    The man smiled at Lorimer with a knowing look in his bright eyes. Here was a rookie detective constable, the expression seemed to say; we’ll be able to have some fun with this one.
    Lorimer stepped up to the viewing platform and looked at the room through the huge window that would separate him from the pathologist’s activities. Several figures appeared from another door; the pathologists gowned and masked, wellington boots on their feet as though to protect themselves from some awful deluge of blood and guts, with several gowned students trailing in their wake. Lorimer shuddered in spite of his earlier resolve to be as objective as he could be. Then his eyes were drawn to a slim shape emerging from the wall as if by magic. A couple of mortuary attendants arrived, lifting the body from its refrigerated cabinet onto the stainless steel table where the two pathologists waited, one pulling at her silicon gloves as though keen to begin. Beside them, on a cloth-covered table, lay an array of surgical instruments, the scalpel blades glittering in the shaft of sunlight that filtered from the windows above.
    It was the same boy that he had seen lying